Giant chairs appear on Canyon Hill High School campus after a long break with no signage to tell who made them.
As soon as school came back in January one of the first things people took note of on campus were the giant pair of chairs that had made their home on campus. Despite there being people comfortably settling in on them, the reasoning behind their presence was never fully told. Unless you were part of, or knew who was in, the process, the chairs simply appeared.
The idea for the chairs originally came from Mr. Snedden, a current AP English and History teacher at Canyon Hills High School. When asked, he was happy to inform that the idea was from “a landscape engineering program, landscape architecture program at UC Davis.” Due to his daughters’ attendance, he was able to know of their own personal projects to promote through his words “community coordination, comfort and all of the above.”
Being the teacher representative of the SOS (Saving Our Seats) club, as well as an avid fan of chairs, he looks for ways to further strengthen the Canyon Hills campus community. Seeing the current disconnect -low attendance to school events, especially the last few movie nights- he says he hopes that the chairs “would become a part of somebody else’s vision.” He hopes to see people in the community take initiative in improving campus connectivity.
Taking “about 4 hours to put them both together” alongside the 6 hour period “to cut and paint and sand and prep” Mr. Snedden recalls that it took about 10 hours total, “with maybe 25 different people being involved in them.” These people came from either collaborating clubs, the woodworking, or SOS club themselves.
Despite all of this work, the chairs don’t exactly display community collaboration as intended. Senior ASB president Sarah Chevrette has been working alongside several other graphic design students to get logos/plaques on them. Special types of stickers and wood engravings are being looked at as possible options for the addition to the chairs as a way to appreciate who took part in the collaboration to bring them to reality, as well as showing that there is work being done on campus and that maybe, it is worthwhile to see what else may come up.
The chairs themselves were funded by the SOS club with money from an unsuccessful fall sports banquet plan. Alongside the CSF club and additional parent donations, there is a third chair coming soon to a campus near you! It is planned to locate down by the new elevator near the concession stand in front of the football field.
Although incomplete, the chairs are serving their purpose, with kids lounging in them before, after, and during school! They can sometimes be caught perching on the armrests too. As they are hard to go unnoticed, they are a welcome, and fun, addition to the Canyon Hills High School Campus.
